This chapter presents you with different installation options.
If you start with an unconfigured host, consider using the automated
setup provided by the pimp-my-box project, which will install all
you need for a fully working torrenting setup including a default
configuration.

Important

If you followed the Manual Turn-Key System Setup instructions of rTorrent-PS, or plan to do so,
you can skip this chapter, all installation steps are covered there already.
They same holds true for using the just mentioned pimp-my-box project.

As you can see, installing the software package itself can be done in two ways,
choose one of them.
Afterwards, the freshly installed software must be provided with a configuration,
as described in the Configuration Guide.

Note

Unless otherwise indicated by using sudo or mentioning it in the text,
installation commands should not be run as root, but in your normal
user account, or else one you specifically created for installing rTorrent
and pyrocore.

When commands and their output are both contained in a code box, $
represents the command prompt of your shell, followed by the command you are
supposed to enter. Do not enter the leading $!

Warning

The syntax of XMLRPC commands changed with rTorrent version 0.8.9,
and continues to change. Make sure that the versions of rTorrent
and PyroScope you plan to install or update to are actually compatible.
There are compensation mechanisms in both projects, but there are limits to those
— scan the respective changelogs for breaking changes.

pyrocore 0.5+ will no longer support the old syntax, and thus not work
with rTorrent 0.8.x versions.
rTorrent 0.9.6 has the old commands disabled by default, and only a
special command line switch will enable them again, for now.
Also, this documentation uses the new syntax (mostly).

Using such a dedicated account also makes sure you don’t need to have fear
this software does anything malicious — if it did, it’d be contained in that
account. It also makes deinstallation or start-from-zero way less of a hassle.

For Debian and derivatives, the apt-get command in the previous section
already took care of everything.

Other Linux distributions usually come equipped with a Python 2.7 interpreter,
but on very new releases, Python 3 may be the default and Python 2.7 just an option.
In case you need to install Python 2, refer to Installing Python on Linux and
consider using pyenv.

The following shows how you can check what version you have as the default (the
sample output is from Ubuntu 15.04):

If you chose to install a release version from the Python package repository (PyPI),
the most simple but not best way is calling pipinstall--user-Upyrocore,
and make sure $HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH.
This way is OK if you just want to use the tools for metafile handling,
i.e. mktor, chtor, and lstor, but not the rTorrent tools.